Dick Cheney's fantasy war
New revelations about the Bush administration's secret post-9/11 anti-terror operations demand a full investigationJohn McQuaid
guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 July 2009 22.00
When the 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum debuted, in the twilight of the Bush administration, critics viewed its plot as a metaphor for post-9/11 America's excesses. The movie features a CIA deputy director who oversees the agency's post-9/11 "black ops", casually ordering the killing of a reporter for the Guardian who published details of CIA activities, and lectures a subordinate on the agency's extraordinary new authority:
Full envelope intrusion, rendition, experimental interrogation – it is all run out of this office. We are the sharp end of the stick now... No more red tape. No more getting the bad guys caught on our sights, then watching them escape while we wait for somebody in Washington to issue the order.
It turns out the movie wasn't quite so purely metaphorical. Over the past week there's been a steady drip of disquieting revelations on America's post-9/11 intelligence programmes, and the reality is starting to look something like the Bourne Ultimatum's sharp end of the stick. The most surprising new information came on Sunday, when the Wall Street Journal reported:
Amid the high alert following the September 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al-Qaida operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.
"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."
This particular idea was never implemented, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the agency continued to look at ways it might assassinate suspected terrorists until last month, when CIA director Leon Panetta cancelled the effort, which had been concealed from Congress – reportedly, though not surprisingly, at the behest of Dick Cheney.
Last week a report by inspectors general at five federal agencies offered more insights into the efforts of the National Security Agency and CIA on warrantless eavesdropping. It turns out there not just one, but an entire suite of secret efforts that the report helpfully labelled "the President's Surveillance Programme" (PSP). On top of this came the news that attorney general Eric Holder wants an investigation into the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/13/cheney-cia-black-ops 
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